Customer Reviews

Johnny Mathis: A 50th Anniversary Celebration

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Gold: A 50th Anniversary Celebration is a somewhat disappointing single CD retrospective that just can't possibly reflect all the golden hits of Johnny Mathis' illustrious career. The sound quality, however, is very good; and the artwork is nicely done.

The track set starts with Johnny Mathis performing "Chances Are." This awesome hit for Johnny brings out all the wonderful qualities of his voice. Johnny croons this number just as well as the best of them ever could! The musical arrangement uses the strings to great advantage and I love every minute of it! "Wonderful! Wonderful!" follows and if you're not hooked on Johnny Mathis by now you may wish to check your pulse! Johnny sings this to perfection and beyond; he never misses a beat and I'm very impressed with "Wonderful! Wonderful!"

"It's Not For Me To Say" was definitely another huge hit for Johnny; this beautiful melody sounds very sweet and Johnny Mathis delivers this with great panache. The piano arrangement is very elegant and the overall effect is gorgeous. "Misty" is another excellent classic pop hit that features Johnny front and center. Johnny's excellent diction and timing turns "Misty" into a true masterpiece. Listen also for "A Certain Smile;" this love song never sounded better than when Johnny sang it and it's great he's still here today to perform it in concert all over again!

"What'll I Do" gets the royal treatment for this masterful talent named Johnny Mathis; he delivers this beautifully with sophistication, heart and soul. The backup chorus enhances the beauty of the number. There's also "In A Sentimental Mood;" Johnny massages the lyrics to make this tune remarkably beautiful and it all works very well.

"The Shadow Of Your Smile" has a stunning arrangement and the horn solo works well for this romantic number. The album also ends nicely with Johnny and Ray Charles performing Judy Garland's signature song entitled "Over The Rainbow." Johnny Mathis and Ray Charles sing "Over The Rainbow" with great sensitivity; and this makes a wonderful ending for this CD.

Now I have no gripes or complaints about these heavenly numbers. Johnny's voice is in excellent form throughout the CD and the music is grand. However, I must complain that any set of eighteen tracks is just not enough for the producers of the CD to call this a golden type of "50th anniversary celebration." That would take a CD box set.

Fans of Johnny Mathis will be charmed by this although they also have these numbers already in their collections. Casual fans and newcomers to Johnny Mathis will benefit more from this single CD retrospective. Diehard fans will appreciate the four CD boxed set called The Music of Johnny Mathis - A Personal Collection. This box set is also available for sale on this website.

This should have been every bit a 4CD set for the audio alone, and yet Mathis is limited to 18 songs? For someone like me, who has followed him for the last 22 years, and who has nearly every digitized studio CD put out for him, this particular collection is a maddening travesty. This should have been Johnny Mathis' year of glory. He should have had a Kennedy Center honor, and he should have had a comprehensive "thank you" from the industry for his 50-year career, at least 4 CDs plus video tracks, but apparently 50 years in any field is so commonplace it doesn't mean anything anymore. I'm not happy with what they've done in the way of "celebrating" Johnny Mathis, not at all.

This so-called "50th Anniversary Celebration" is no celebration, no "thank you" to Johnny Mathis for his artistry and longevity. It's nothing more than a plain old compilation like Johnny's Greatest Hits or the Ultimate Hits Collection. One could look at this as being a reasonable selection of songs from 1957 on, except that there's a huge problem. It seems to skip the 70s and most of the 80s and 90s altogether, and during that period there were some damn fine recordings produced by Thom Bell, Robert Mersey, Johnny Bristol, and Phil Ramone to name a few. It ignores all the ones that have yet to be released. This would have been the perfect time to bring them out. It all comes off as a slapdash effort to me, and I really don't care why it ended up being the way it ended up being. It should have been so much MORE.

So obviously, this wasn't designed for someone like me. Who then buys these compilations? Through my website, I learned long ago that there are people who don't know a lot about Johnny Mathis and want to learn about him without being chastised for asking. Buying this set MAY be a useful introduction to Mathis, but even there, I believe there are better, more comprehensive collections, that are less expensive now, as well, and these are available both by download as well as by CD. Johnny's Personal Collection 4CD boxed set, from the nineties, does a far better job of reviewing the last 50 years than this set does, which has nothing special to distinguish it even from the other compilations still available by download and CD.

Unless, of course, one considers the reflections of Mr. Mathis, himself, on the 18 cuts that supposedly sum up his 50 year career. Someone read to me over the phone his interesting and poignant running commentary, included in the CD booklet but not available by download, about each of the 18 songs included on the compilation, written in a similar style as for the Personal Collection boxed set. He gives a heartfelt thanks to George Avakian and even former manager Helen Noga and asks, "what did they see in me?" He even explains what happened with the infamous album of Brazilian songs produced by Sergio Mendes, recorded before the Mathis Sings Ellington project.

A product of that recording session, "So Many Stars", played for me over the phone, while over 15 years old, still sounds fresh, as if it were recorded yesterday. The one other new song, "The Shadow of Your Smile" features Dave Koz and Chris Botti and is exquisite, is reminiscent of the Mercury Records recording only sultrier, and is available by download right now if you don't want to buy this recording or wait for Koz's album, "At the Movies," to come out at the end of January. For me, Koz's album will be worth it just for having Anita Baker singing again on it, as well as Barry Manilow and Donna Summer! Plus, it's produced by Phil Ramone, who produced Mathis' lovely "All About Love" album from - yikes - over 10 years ago.

Are Mathis' thoughts the dealmaker for me? Probably not. As much as I'd like to have them, I can wait until a few more show up in the used section or eBay if I were to consider buying. Would someone other than me consider this worth buying? Of course. Someone who wants to read the booklet, someone who would rather not pay a dollar for the download of one of the new songs, someone who would rather not buy another artist's CD, or, someone who had managed to get her name in the credits and needs something to crow about, I guess. But practically speaking, it would be kind of a waste for someone who downloads music to their iPods or iTunes and makes their own CDs. Will this make a good gift for Grandma or Grandpa? Possibly, if there's somebody out there who likes Johnny Mathis, never got Johnny's Greatest Hits on CD, doesn't know he's still alive, doesn't have anything digitally available for him, would like to read what he says in the booklet, and won't care how old the pictures are on the cover.

Compilations are weird phenomena, and it seems there are people who will buy them regardless, as if the idea is to just throw away the Ultimate Hits Collection from eight years ago in favor of this one. I'm not one of those people. I didn't even touch that last compilation. Besides content, for Johnny Mathis' 50th Anniversary, I wanted to see RESPECT for a 50-year body of work, and this collection just doesn't do it for me, because I don't believe it does it for him. Not the way it should have been done. So unless I get this as a gift, I'm not going to go out of my way to get it.

A 50-year career such as that of Johnny Mathis needs more than Johnny's Greatest Hits and a couple of carrots to dangle made to look as if it were something really special. In this age when the CD isn't even relevant anymore, it's just not feasible, and it's just not right. In my opinion, if either one of these 50th CDs weren't piggybacked with the concert video, just like the previous compilation, the Ultimate Hits Collection, was piggybacked to Live By Request, they wouldn't get many bites on this one. The idea that this is the best that his people and his label could come up with for one of the last of the great singers just about breaks my heart. The name of Johnny Mathis used to stand for something; his record company apparently has little respect for that. In the meantime, Tony Bennett just keeps going and going...

This CD offers a real mixed bag for a variety of reasons. The first nine tracks have been released and reissued on numerous CD and LP compilations, at minimum, a dozen times. While CHANCES ARE, THE TWELFTH OF NEVER, and MISTY capture Mathis' ethereal brand of romance, these songs are likely to already be located in a devoted Mathis fan's collection several times over.

Tracks 10 through 18 on this CD offer a different mix. The inclusion of ONE GOD and DEEP RIVER from Mathis' religious LP "Good Night, Dear Lord," is a somewhat welcome surprise given that his interpretation of these religious songs is totally unique. No one has sang them with such anguished beauty before or since. The LP "Good Night, Dear Lord" has been reissued, however, on CD in its entirety. A large number of younger fans are completely unaware that he ever sang anything other than romantic and Xmas fare.

IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD from his Ellington CD of the same name is also a good showcase of Mathis' Jazz-oriented roots, something his last original CD "Isn't It Romantic" also showcased quite well. SO MANY STARS, an exquisite song that highlights Mathis' incomparable vocal range was recorded in the 1980s when his voice was, arguably, at its absolute peak; this song has never been released until now. Along with this is a newly recorded version of THE SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE with sax man Dave Koz, which demonstrates that Mathis can reinvent a song twice as he recorded this song back in 1966 for an LP of the same name. Unfortunately, that LP and much of Mathis' recorded output from the mid-to-late 1970s through the 1980s have not been reissued on CD. And with the cost of song publishing and licensing rights already through the roof, we may have a long wait before these recordings make it to CD format.

There really isn't a bad song on this CD, and a listener less acquainted with Mathis will get an accurate taste of how well his voice and interpretive powers have held up over the last fifty years!! The only problem is that for so many of us, most of this CD contains music we already own. The lushness and newness of SO MANY STARS and THE SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE, however, almost makes the additional purchase worth it.

This collection of songs consists mainly of Johnny's million sellers in the late 50's. But there are a few songs from the 80's,90's, and the 21st century. This amazing balladeer has spanned fifty years of rapid changes in the culture and the music industry and has survived. Johnny does and has performed much more difficult, up tempo, and inventive songs in public than are recorded here. But this sample does show Johnny's amazing versatility and ability. Truly a collector's item, this collection leaves you wanting more. There will probably never be another male vocalist with the style, on-pitch accuracy, and range of Johnny Mathis. And romantic ballads are his specialty.

I am a big fan of Johnny Mathis and have always loved his music and his personality. He is the best as far as I am concerned and it is too bad the new singers of today don't use Johnny as a role model.

Some of the reviewers of this CD seek perfection in the tracks, desire his entire life history on 4 CD's, critique the fact that many of the renditions are original and not redone,etc. All I can say as a professional musician and composer (as a side-career), is that ANYTHING issued by Johnny Mathis, summarizing in whole or part his extraordinary voice, should be welcomed. Generations since thrive on lunatics smashing electric guitars, or talent being based on how tight the jeans are. When we bring up The Golden Oldies of the 50's, or point to PBS broadcasts of true talent, even musically adept kids are wont to toss it off as "old=fashioned." Well, the more we have CD's like Johnny Mathis around, the more exposure he'll have.

I am not a CD buyer, but was inspired to buy this one after listening to Johnny's interview on TV a few weeks ago, and I am so glad I did. One note of advise, be sure and take your heart medication before listening to this one. You're gonna need it.

Johnny Mathis is truly one of the Greatest Vocalists Ever. this is a Great Compilation that celebrates 50 years of Johnny Mathis. "Chances Are", it's not for me to say", etc... Johnny Mathis has a Voice that is timeless&you always know His pressence in song. I've bought quite a few of His Albums over the years&Johnny Mathis vocally hasn't lost a thing. now the interesting thing about this Compilation is that it's only One disc. when you think of a Artist such as Johnny Mathis you wonder how can you capture His Greatness only on One Disc?

I think this is the BEST Johnny Mathis collection of his greatest hits to date. I have been a fan since the early 60's and I have many albums. This, however, brings the BEST songs together collectively. I would recommend this CD if you are as big a fan as I am!!!!

Excellent CD and a must for all Mathis fans. Johnny sounds as mellow as ever!!!